Wayanad is a Congress stronghold and he has been with the party since 2009.
New Delhi:
In this Lok Sabha election, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi will face off against Kerala BJP chief Surendran in the high-profile Wayanand constituency.
Wayanad is a Congress stronghold and he has been with the party since 2009. Mr Gandhi won the party in 2019 and retained membership in the Lok Sabha, but lost his Amethi seat to Union Minister Smriti Irani.
This time his rival Mr Surendran has the big task of challenging the Congress-Left binary in Kerala’s political landscape. Both the Congress and the Left have formed a national alliance, although they remain rivals in the southern state.
In the 2019 general election, Mr. Surendran came third in Pathanamthitta constituency, behind the Congress and the Left. In the 2016 assembly elections, he lost to Manjeswaram by just 89 votes. He also contested the polls in 2019 but also failed.
He was appointed as the chief of the BJP’s Kerala unit in 2020 and became the face of the protests against the entry of young women into Sabarimala years ago.
Surendran, who hails from Kozhikode, appears in the BJP’s fifth candidate list, which also includes actor Kangana Ranaut and former Calcutta High Court judge Abhijit Gangopad yeah.
Wayanad is the second Kerala seat after Thiruvananthapuram to see a titanic battle, where Union Minister Rajiv Chandrasekhar will face three-time MP Shashi Tharoor .
The BJP has also fielded former vice-chancellor of Sri Sankara Sanskrit University KS Radhakrishnan from Ernakulam and actor-turned-politician G Krishnakumar from Kollon. Former educationist TN Sarasu will contest from Alatur in Palakkad.
The highlight of the BJP’s fifth list is actor Kangana Ranaut from Mandi making her electoral debut in her home state of Himachal Pradesh. The list lists 111 candidates from 17 states and also includes new entrants such as industrialists Naveen Jindal and Gangopadhyay.
Mr Gangopadhyay, who recently joined the BJP after voluntary retirement, is the first former judge to join electoral politics. He traveled from Tamluk in Bengal to take on the Trinamool’s youth leader Debangshu Bhattacharya, who sang the lyrics to their iconic anthem “Khela Hobe” “Creator.
Varun Gandhi, the sitting MP from Pilibhit, has been ousted and his seat has been replaced by Jitin Prasada, who switched from the Congress to the BJP before the elections. His mother Maneka Gandhi has left Sultanpur, her current seat.
Actor Arun Govil, who played Ram in the popular TV series Ramayana, will compete from Meerut. Union Minister Ashwini Kumar Choubey and General VK Singh are also on the list.
